Now here’s an old friend that I haven’t heard in a long time. As with the previous Pink Floyd albums, it was with a mix of excitement and trepidation that I approached this – would it still hit me like it did back when I was 17?
To which the answer is... mostly. Like other albums on here that I used to consume avidly, I can bring to mind pretty much every bit of every track without trying, so the novelty and surprise element is missing. It’s not exactly a warm fuzzy security blanket either; one thing I did feel grateful for was not having the same sense of confusion and isolation that I had as a teenager. Maybe a different, older, flavour of the same, but not as deeply felt.
The Wall is a concept album that’s mainly the brainchild of Roger Waters, but with some creative input from David Gilmour and producer Bob Ezrin. It tells the story of a rock star, named Pink in the Alan Parker film (played by Bob Geldof) but not explicitly named on the album (while he’s trying to phone his wife, however, the operator mentions a call “from Mr Floyd to Mrs Floyd”).
Side One opens with a bombastic concert opener, In The Flesh, before moving back to review Pink’s childhood – a father killed in WWII, abusive schoolmasters (whose “fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them to within inches of their life”) and an over-protective mother. Side Two sees an adult Pink, estranged from his wife, lonely and on tour, seeking solace with casual sex with a groupie and discovering that his wife is unfaithful in her turn. Pink goes berserk, smashes up his room and scares the groupie away.
These hardships in his life cause him to build his Wall, a psychological barrier against the world, but he ends up trapped within it. Side Three combines Pink endlessly watching “thirteen channels of shit on the TV” (only thirteen?) and stuck in his own mind, revisiting his past and, like The Who’s Tommy, silently crying out for anyone to notice him (Is There Anybody Out There?). At the end of the side, Pink is discovered in his room – in the film by his manager played by Bob Hoskins – and drugged into some semblance of normality so that he can perform on stage.
On Side Four, Pink imagines himself a fascist leader. It’s not clear when he’s calling out members of his audience with racist and homophobic slurs that Pink is actually doing this (shades of Eric Clapton’s meltdown, or Waters' own problems) or if he’s imagining it. Certainly, as chaos builds, his followers run amok, and he cries out for it all to stop, we then go to an obviously imaginary piece, the showstopping Trial, where his mother, teacher, and wife all appear before a Judge (depicted by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe as a talking anus) to break down Pink’s mental defences.
There are autobiographical elements from Waters here – the death of his father, a bitter divorce, an incident where he was driven to spit at the audience, as well as perhaps an element of Syd Barrett – getting on stage in a state of drug-fuelled delusion. Waters will revisit these themes again in The Final Cut and his solo album Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking. In fact, I wonder if the fact that Pink’s marriage gets relatively short shrift on the album is because Waters was saving that material for Hitchhiking.
The war, meanwhile, is the most re-visited section. Although by the end of Side One we’ve presumably followed Pink through to adolescence (since his mother will “check out all your girlfriends for you”), Side Two returns to a small boy spotting “an airplane up in the sky” and Pink recalling “the falling bombs”. During his Side Three introspective reverie, he thinks of Vera Lynn and demands “Bring The Boys Back Home”, perhaps spurred on by watching the film The Battle Of Britain on TV (judging by the dialogue drop-in).
The style of the tracks written by Waters are also more like the tracks found on the two albums given above – more somber, more art/prog in their lack of direct through-melody. The Wall also sets up the use of repeated musical motifs – the opening of In The Flesh, or the repeated motif of the three parts of Another Brick In The Wall, for example, give a sense of musical continuity to the album. The tracks written only by Gilmour are more traditionally rocky – Dirty Woman is almost like a Southern rock piece, while Run Like Hell has a great echoed guitar.
For me, the best tracks are where the two of them combine forces. Mother, Hey You, and the magnificent Comfortably Numb. And, of course, their unlikely Christmas Number One Single, Another Brick In The Wall Part 2. This album is where Pink Floyd’s penchant for peppering sound effects and bits of dialogue to form a contiguous soundscape really arrives at its culmination. The sleeve design has an iconic form – just the wall itself, with Gerald Scarfe’s grotesques on the inside, the crossed-hammers fascist iconography, animations for the film and stage show, the stage show itself where the wall is gradually built between band and audience – it's a big package of disparate elements, but fortunately the music alone stands without all of the extras.
It could, yes, be said to be ponderous and pretentious, a criticism that could be levelled at a lot of Pink Floyd’s work but I’d argue that, like Dark Side Of The Moon, it manages to do what it wants to do to a high enough quality that the result meets the ambition. And yes, I did still enjoy it even if I didn’t listen to it the way my teenage self would consider “properly” and lie in a dark room with it on full blast, head between the speakers.
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